Slate on sewers: poo and more

Slate is featuring a a series on human waste, inevitably titled 'The Wasteland'. No, it's not about politics, it's about sewers and toilets. It's fascinating. I hope London will start offering tours ...

Tentative progress against glioma

I know of two friends of mine, both exemplary individuals with young families, who've died young from glioma. It can be a difficult death, with incremental disability as the surgeons fight a delaying action against the ever-growing tumor. A nasty illness.

So any good news attracts my personal attention, even something as preliminary as this announcement. It may not turn into anything that's clinically relevant; these small trials are infamous for showing dramatic results that turn out to be illusory. It's noteworthy though for the text I've bolded below:

BBC NEWS | Health | Hope for new brain tumour vaccine

US researchers say their vaccine increased survival times for the 23 glioblastoma multiforme patients they tested it on by at least 18 months.

Only four patients went on to die from the cancer, the study to be presented at a meeting of experts in the US said.

... works by targeting a protein thought to drive the tumour's spread...

It uses an artificial form of the protein, which is found on the outside of 30-50% of tumours, to alert the immune system to its presence and attack it.

The brain is tricked into thinking the protein, known as EGFRvIII, is foreign, and fighter cells in the immune system are sent in.

Amy Heimberger, assistant professor of neurosurgery at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas, said the vaccine was an easy-to-use "off-the-shelf" treatment that could potentially help half of all patients with glioblastoma multiforme (GBM).

She said results from the trial showed the vaccine significantly delays the progression of tumours until the cancer finds a new way to grow.

... when tumours did grow again they did not display the EGFRvIII protein

When I was a medical student in 1982 there was great excitement about using immunotherapy to fight cancer. Alas, it almost all failed, though I think there was limited success with some type of melanoma. The fact that the gliomas broke free in this study only after by suprressing this key protein is what makes this result interesting and more plausible than most. There's hope that a combination of modalities might result in real progress -- maybe years of good quality survival and possibly the occasional cure ...

So how did the ultrarich manage to conceal their role in repealing the estate tax?

It's not surprising that the ultrarich should wish to repeal the estate tax. It's impressive how well they were able to conceal their role.

Maybe the Heirs Aren't Apparent - New York Times

THE watchdog group Public Citizen (citizen.org) and the advocacy group United for a Fair Economy (faireconomy.org) issued a report this week saying that 18 superwealthy families are largely responsible for financing the lobbying campaign aimed at repealing the estate tax; the Senate is scheduled to take up repeal next month.

The families, worth $185.5 billion, have financed and coordinated the campaign and have, until now, managed to hide their participation behind the trade associations and business groups they have formed to represent their interests, Public Citizen reported. The families include those behind some of the nation's biggest and best-known companies, like Wal-Mart, E.& J. Gallo Winery, Nordstrom and Koch Industries.

I wonder how many GOP races they funded in the last election? They don't have to bribe anyone directly, they just have to make sure their friends get into the House, Senate and White House.

The interesting question is how they managed to conceal their role so effectively. What else is this group up to that we don't know about? Are there any journalists left outside Salon and the Wall Street Journal? (Hello, NYT, anyone home?) The place to start is to think what else this group would care about, then look for odd infusions of cash, then trace the cash back. For them a $10 million "gift" is chump change. That's enough to buy a bunch of US Senators.

The hidden inflation of low quality

We have two DVD/VCR combo devices at home. One has a broken VCR, the other a broken DVD. They each cost about $120 and lasted about 18 months.

We once bought a VCR for about $250 that lasted five years. We had a CD player that lasted 12 years, in today's dollars it probably cost $550 or so.

So prices have fallen by at least half, but lifespans have fallen by about 3/4. The cost of ownership has risen significantly.

I wonder if that shows up in our inflation statistics, or do they just measure the cost of purchase?

Update 6/30/2013: Economists do write about this. I found this reference in notes from Baylor.edu in the context of price controls.

D.      Countries that exercise price controls experience:
1.      Open, reported inflation - Occurs because not all prices are controlled or because planners increase prices.
2.      Hidden inflation - Monetary price increases, but not measured.
a.      Hidden transactions - black market or "under the table"
b.      Hidden quality deterioration, false quality improvement, or forced substitution of high-quality for low-quality products
3.      Repressed inflation - Occurs when price controls are effective, and inflationary pressure causes shortages or queues.

I thought of this again when Emily tried to buy our children a 'slip and slide' water toy. It cost $5, it leaked, and Target won't accept returns (obviously, if they accepted returns they could not sell these toys).

Searching Amazon, all of these devices had 2-3 star ratings due to leaks; there was nothing available at any price that was reliable. In Akerlof's words "Only lemons are on offer". On the other hand, we could buy 4 of the $5 toys and probably one would work. If our time cost nothing, and waste disposal were free, that would be the equivalent of a $20 toy (right price).

We don't have price controls, but we do have severe worldwide deflationary pressures -- probably related to global wealth concentration. They may be having the same effect as price controls, at least when it comes to quality.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: Emergence, unanticipated consequences, and hidden inflation 5/2007
• Gordon's Notes: What if ours were a crisis of currency and quality? 3/2009. Pencil sharpener test.
• Gordon's Notes: Apple's battery charger, occult inflation, and the future of American industry 2010 rant. I think, overall, things are a bit better.
• Gordon's Notes: Why quality collapsed in the bubble years: Akerlof and the last good toaster 3/2012. How it can be that only lemons are available.

An unwanted gift from Windows Update

I have my XP update configured to auto-download, but not to auto-install. I have to authorize the updates. I do this mostly so I can choose when to reboot, I've always authorized them.

Until today. That's when the update included this gem:

Windows Genuine Advantage
Size: 0.8 MB

The Windows Genuine Advantage Notification tool notifies you if your copy of Windows is not genuine. If your system is found to be a non-genuine, the tool will help you obtain a licensed copy of Windows.

Hmph. That's a nice gift. I hear WGA either does Office checking now or will soon.

Ethically I make an exception for Microsoft when it comes to stealing software. An illegal monopoly, paying the Bushies in return for a wrist slap, using the monopoly to perpetuate things like Microsoft Word -- heck, steal away you rogues you.

Practically, however, I'm not personally going to take the risk of running unlicensed Microsoft products. I use as little of their stuff as possible, but my licenses are clean. All the same, I'm going to wait and see when Microsoft will require WGA to get security updates. I figure that date is about two months away. I'll install then.

I'm so looking forward to replacing my XP box with an OS X environment that will virtualize Windows. I'll use my old Office and my old XP until their bits rot away ...

We really need to encourage Ann Coulter

Ann Coulter uses sexual innunendo to taunt adolescent males to attack protesters. I love it. She's so stupid, and so wrong, that she's walking performance art. With just a bit of a push she might go right over the edge.

It's the duty of every rationalist and humanist to encourage Ann to go just a bit further ... I don't think she'll hurt herself (or I wouldn't be advising this), but she's going to start doing some serious harm to her causes ...

Hookers, spies and the GOP

If the GOP hadn't sold their soul for power I'd almost feel sorry for the party. Duke Cunningham, a GOP stalwart convicted of accepting bribes, is a fallen hero -- but now his fall is looking ever more impressive...

Obsidian Wings: Girls!! Girls!! Girls!!

...according to people with knowledge of the investigation, Mr. Wade told investigators that Mr. Cunningham periodically phoned him to request a prostitute, and that Mr. Wade then helped to arrange for one. A limousine driver then picked up the prostitute as well as Mr. Cunningham...

...I've learned from a well-connected source that those under intense scrutiny by the FBI are current and former lawmakers on Defense and Intelligence comittees—including one person who now holds a powerful intelligence post. I've also been able to learn the name of the limousine service that was used to ferry the guests and other attendees to the parties: Shirlington Limousine and Transportation of Arlington, Virginia. Wilkes, I've learned, even hired Shirlington as his personal limousine service.

It gets even more interesting: the man who has been identified as the CEO of Shirlington has a 62-page rap sheet (I recently obtained a copy) that runs from at least 1979 through 1989 and lists charges of petit larceny, robbery, receiving stolen goods, assault, and more. Curiously—or perhaps not so curiously given the company's connections—Shirlington Limousine is also a Department of Homeland Security contractor; according to the Washington Post, last fall it won a $21.2 million contract for shuttle services and transportation support...

As to the festivities themselves, I hear that party nights began early with poker games and degenerated into what the source described as a "frat party" scene—real bacchanals. Apparently photographs were taken, and investigators are anxiously procuring copies.

The rumor is that this "senior official" has been suspected in Washington circles of leading a bit of a double life. If you want to know the name you'll have to visit the site. My morals allow me to point, but not to repeat.

If there are photos, this will be both terrible and irresistible.

Robert Reich has a blog

I was reading a NYT article on how Reich exposed a corporation trying to bribe him, when I was surprised by a reference to Robert Reich's Blog. I've long admired Reich, a curmudgeonly and proudly liberal intellectual best known for his stint as Clinton's labor secretary. His book 'Reason' was a terrific antidote to Coulter's diatribe. I was surprised, then, to learn I'd missed his blog!

Turns out he started it this month, I'm the 3rd bloglines subscriber. Let the deluge begin!

Update 4/28/06: Looks like the corruption story was his third post. The company was GM.

BTW, it's cute to see how he starts his blog:

Okay, so I'm blogging and blathering. I never thought it would come to this. But there's no other way to tell the whole truth. I don't know if anyone will read this blog, but it's worth a try. Until tomorrow ...

posted by Robert Reich | 5:35 PM | 9 comments
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
A test from your son

Dad,

I know you may feel tentative about me setting this up for you, but I couldn't resist. Blogs are a great way to reach an audience immediately. I'm going to send you posting instructions to your email. You can post personal thoughts, political theory, pictures one day, a quote another, anything. There is an audience for this stuff, but you have to start posting to get it.

Much love.

Reich clearly had no idea how big his audience will be. I suspect he's learning ...

Longer life through younger mothers

The children of young mohters may live longer, on average, than the children of older mothers:

John Hawks Anthropology Weblog : Longer life with younger mothers:

...They also discovered that being the first-born in a family meant a lot, boosting the odds of making it to 100 by nearly 80 percent...

... statistical analysis revealed that young maternal age at birth completely accounted for the first-born effect.

Paternal age had no affet in this study.

Everyone's first guess is that it's the age of the mitochondria that matter, in humans virtually all mitochondria are maternal. One wonders how many "first born" effects are really effects of maternal age.

Building virtual worlds in Google Earth: SketchUp

Great Cyber Shades of Snow Crash. Google is providing tools to build virtual worlds -- atop Google Earth.

Official Google Blog: A great day for 3D

... The new Google SketchUp is for the do-it-yourselfer, the hobbyist — really anyone who wants to build 3D models for use in Google Earth. Go ahead and model that new kitchen, or deck, landscape your virtual garden, or impress your teacher with a roller coaster or medieval castle. When you’re finished, place your model in Google Earth. There! The beginning of a virtual world. Warning: don’t start messing with this stuff after dinner because your first experience could be an all-nighter… making an idea come to life in 3D can be very addicting.

And what could be better than that? Well, sharing your work with everyone else through the 3D Warehouse. Accessible through both versions of SketchUp, 3D Warehouse enables you to upload, search, browse, view, and download SketchUp models. Just as you do with Google search, enter some keywords and the 3D Warehouse shows you all your options. Grab the one you want and import it into your model. (Note that the Warehouse is not stocked up yet — so model something yourself and upload it for all the world to see.)

Windows client, Mac promised (we'll see ...).

Google Calendar is hot!

Google Calendar is hot. I've posted in my tech blog that it's giving me geek goosebumps. A recent discovery, however, pushed it over the edge into this blog.

The XML URL for Google Calendar is a Feed. I now have a private bloglines entry that simply shows updates or changes to calendar events. Now, when my wife updates an event in the family calendar, my bloglines web-client RSS reader will display the updated event. This works even for a non-shared private calendar.

To find the feed url, click on 'manage calendars', a subtle link on screen left (anatomic right). Then click the calendar name you want to manage. (I have two calendars: Personal and Family. I can view them separately or as an integrated calendar. My wife can edit the Family calendar and view my personal calendar.)

You'll see Calendar Details. Click the XML button for the private address. A URL pops up with the helpful note that "you can copy and paste this into any feed reader". It works as advertised. Now bloglines shows the entries I haven't seen yet, and it only shows changes. If I'm logged in and I click on the header for an 'article' I get the details of the event for editing.

Then there's the tight integration with Gmail, the parsing of mail to create events, the natural language processing, etc. I've even momentarily stopped hating Google for letting Blogger fester ...

PS. Privacy? Surely you jest. Privacy is sooo 20th century.

Worse than Buchanan?

I don't know how I missed this one. Better late than never. Historians, admittedly an intellectual, thoghtful and liberal group, struggle to place Bush in the ranking of worst presidents:

Rolling Stone : The Worst President in History?

... Colleagues at Princeton to argue idly about which president really was the worst of them all. For years, these perennial debates have largely focused on the same handful of chief executives whom national polls of historians, from across the ideological and political spectrum, routinely cite as the bottom of the presidential barrel. Was the lousiest James Buchanan, who, confronted with Southern secession in 1860, dithered to a degree that, as his most recent biographer has said, probably amounted to disloyalty -- and who handed to his successor, Abraham Lincoln, a nation already torn asunder? Was it Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, who actively sided with former Confederates and undermined Reconstruction? What about the amiably incompetent Warren G. Harding, whose administration was fabulously corrupt? Or, though he has his defenders, Herbert Hoover, who tried some reforms but remained imprisoned in his own outmoded individualist ethic and collapsed under the weight of the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression's onset? The younger historians always put in a word for Richard M. Nixon, the only American president forced to resign from office.

Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a "failure." Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration's "pursuit of disastrous policies." In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton -- a category in which Bush is the only contestant.

Well, an informal survey really doesn't mean too much, but I'm betting Bush will be among the 'worst of the worst' 20 years from now. Other than as an excuse for venting, the article is an excellent summary of the many ways that Bush has failed, irregardless of one's opinion of his underlying ideology.

It's not simply that his economic policies reward his campaign contributors and his old friends at the expense of his voters (forget the dems, just consider Bush supporters), it's that these actions contradict his rhetoric and impair his effectiveness. So he's even bad at being bad.

It's handy reference to have at hand when someone asks "what's so bad about Bush?".

Iraq: nobody knows where it will go

Phil Carter is a marine and a lawyer. His military law and politics blog was a few years old when he chose to rejoin the marines and deploy in Iraq. He's there now.

He reviews The Assassin's Gate, a book that's highly critical of the conduct of Rumsfeld, Cheney and (thus) Bush but is supportive of the US military's work on the ground. The review, and Phil's guarded commentary (he's on active service) are well worth reading.

I spent some time in Israel 20 years ago. That's where I learned that the reality on the ground is vastly more complex than what media can tell us, or even what intelligence analysts can capture. Carter says the same thing about Iraq. It's a complex place. There's a lot happening. You can justify whatever story you want to tell. Nobody knows how it will turn out, or what the cost will be.

Personally (I think Carter might agree), I think the odds would improve if Rumsfeld were gone, if Cheney were to shuffle off to a secret hide-out, and if Bush were to turn over the strategic direction to the braintrust Howard Baker is now leading. That might even happen ...

Black holes: the heart and lungs of a galaxy

It turns out that the supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies like our's pump out a great deal of energy. This has some interesting effects on the evolution of a galaxy:

Black holes generate green energy - Space.com - MSNBC.com:

... The energy that each black hole emits as jets warms the surrounding environment. This prevents gas from cooling and coalescing into billions of new stars, and places an upper limit on how large a galaxy can grow.'In an environmental sense, the black holes are actually preventing galactic sprawl from taking over the neighborhood,' Weaver said."

Gas rushes into the black hole, pulses of energy rush out. To a physician it sounds like the heart and the lungs of a galaxy. Without these massive black holes it sounds like galaxies would be crowded with stars, and presumably much less hospitable to life ...

A guide to covert communications

Advice for paranoid reporters was written (somewhat sardonically) to help reporters deal with the age of Bush, but it's a handy catalog of techniques to use when one wishes to retain a measure of confidentiality and privacy.